How to automate follow up emails & increase b2b leads
Lead generation is hard for several reasons. One of them is not having a proper follow up email strategy. Most of the sales people send one email to their prospect and then expect them to reply.
It is said by several experts including Harward Business Review that a good follow up email sequence includes around 7-9 email touch to a prospect and that’s when salespeople get the most of the responses.
Why is having a sales follow up sequence so relevant?
When you send a cold email to a prospect then its said as per your timing and this do not include factors that are out of your control like:
your prospect is travelling
your prospect is working on something really important and they have not checked your email
your prospect is on vacations
Now lets say you send one email to your prospect and wait for them to respond you back. If they fall into any of the above criterions then chances are your email went into ignore zone.
Now let’s say you have sent one email and waited for 3-4 days and sent another follow up email. This time, your prospect was available and had some time to check your email.
Your chance of getting a response have increased a lot in this case.
How to create a follow up email sequence?
The reason why most people do not send follow up emails is because they have to keep a track of it manually and do not get time to track which of your prospect have replied you back and who have not.
By using a reply tracking and automated email sender tool, you can get rid of this problem completely.
There are several tools which can help you in automating your email follow ups:
EasyLeadz has an integrated sales follow up email sequence manager which can track which of your prospects have replied you on the first email. Once they reply, it will stop sending them further emails. If they do no reply on the first email then it will automatically send them a follow up email after 2-3 days of interval.
You can add as many as follow up emails as you want and set interval gap.
Once you have your email templates ready including follow up sequences then you can setup all your emails in either Easyleadz or any other tool of your choice.
Using a proper follow up email sequence will improve your response rates by atleast 30-40% if not higher.
Once you have setup your email campaign then you can monitor its open rates, response rates and also work on improving your email deliverability.
Location: North Conway, New Hampshire, United States
Company Type:Clinic
Description: It offers high-quality care and a variety of oral surgery treatments, including wisdom teeth removal and the placement of dental implants.
Recent activity: Funding round – Series B – 40 million USD
Location: San Francisco, United States
Company Type: SAAS, Conversation Intelligence
Description: Conversation intelligence platform for B2B sales teams. It helps you convert more of your pipeline into revenue by shining the light on your team’s sales conversations. Gong records, transcribe and analyzes every sales call so you can scale the effectiveness of your sales conversations.
Recent activity: Funding round – Series C – 25 million USD
Location: New York, United States
Company Type: Omnichannel, E-commerce, Mobile app
Description: A fashion re-commerce startup based in New York City and founded by a team out of Harvard Business School. The ultimate destination for endless access to luxury handbags. Runs both online and offline store.
Recent activity: Funding round – Series B – 14 million USD
Location: New York, United States
Company Type: SAAS, Customer Engagement, Digital Assistant
Description: As a data-first and AI-centric company, zoovu leverages all of today’s digital touchpoints to enable authentic 1-1 conversations. It empowers brands to truly understand their customers and help deliver incredible brand engagement by asking questions.
Company Type: Marketplace, B2B, Consumer, Mobile app, Market Research
Description: Corus is a market research platform allowing direct communication between businesses and customers. Through an integrated survey platform, app, and collaborative tools, Corus captures customer feedback in a matter of hours, not days and weeks.
Description: Offline fitness studio based out of San Diego.
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If you have any suggestions on how we can improve this email or what would you like to know more about the companies or prospects then feel free to email me at nitin@easyleadz.com or reply to this email.
Every day the job of the sales person is getting difficult because of low attention span of customers.
Sales people reach out to 1000 prospects and get only limited replies and often get disheartened.
There can be many reasons for not being able to generate good quality leads, few of them are:
Not defining your ideal customer profiles
Not having a well targeted B2B list
Poor quality database
Not having an effective email template and follow up strategy
Not improving your targeting consistently based on results
We at EasyLeadz too faced this challenges in initial days, that’s why we built our own tool EasyBot which can research companies for us, find the right decision makers and initiate a conversation with them over email.
Based on our experience of working with many chat support tools I am sharing some effective tips that can help you generate quality leads for your chat support tool business.
Target recently funded companies
The reason why recently funded companies are relevant to any chat support tool is that these companies have now money in their bank and they can invest this money in improving their customer support function.
Now, if you are a customer support or chat support tool provider then reaching out to these companies can improve your chances of generating a quality lead.
There are many ways to track such companies:
Crunchbase
Google news articles
EasyLeadz automated sales intelligence tool
If you go to Crunchbase then you can find daily alerts of funded companies globally. The only challenge will be that in their free plan you cannot setup email alerts or download the list.
You will have to manually go every day (infact every few hours) to track these companies.
Crunchbase
The other method of tracking recently funded companies will be setting up Google news alerts.
You will receive notifications whenever there is a keyword mention like “startup funding” in google news. The problem with this approach is that you will miss lot of these companies as not everyone gets a news article coverage for their funding announcement.
You can filter companies based on industry, their headquarters and employee size. There are advanced filters like Ecommerce, SAAS and technology used by the companies.
Once you setup an EasyBot – it can literally work like your sales person 24/7 and start finding funded companies daily and reach out to the decision makers over their emails via your connected email account.
We use the same method to reach out to B2B companies who have recently raised funding as they will now spend more money on sales and can use tool like EasyLeadz.
Target companies hiring for complementary roles
The other effective strategy is to track companies who are hiring for roles that are complementary to your business.
In your case a company that is hiring for chat support or customer support or customer service roles are more relevant.
Why you should care to track such companies?
Its simple. If a company is hiring for customer support than it clearly means they have more need for customer support and this company is already having a budget to afford a person for customer role and is determined to address challenges in customer support function.
A company that is already investing money in this function is the one who is more likely to invest money in a tool for customer support.
You can use following methods to track such companies:
Reach out to these companies to identify whether they have a need for a chat support tool or not.
Google job search
The challenge will be if you want to further narrow down your search and do it daily then it becomes too much manual work for any sales person to do.
The other option is to go to job portals like Indeed or Naukri.com and track companies who are hiring for customer support roles.
Job portal Indeed
The challenge will still remain the same i.e how to do it manually at a scale and narrow down your search by size of company, industry of the company, location of the prospects, further advanced targeting criterions like SAAS, Ecommerce and many more options.
Third option is to use Easyleadz sales intelligence and automation tool to track companies who are hiring for customer support role and setup an EasyBot to capture those companies daily.
Once EasyBot captures these companies it will start finding the right decision makers as per your defined criterion and start reaching out to them over email with a personalised email template added by you.
EasyLeadz hiring intent signals
Target companies by technologies they use
The other targeting criterion is by identifying what kind of technologies your customers are using.
By technology I mean if they are already using your competitors chat support tool then you can reach out to them.
You can always customise your email campaign based on this particular targeting criterion and include in your email copy more information on how you are better than your competitor’s chat support tool.
There are two methods to find such companies:-
Builtwith technology finder tool
EasyLeadz sales intelligence & automation tool
If you have a tool which is similar to Intercom then you can search for which companies are using Intercom already by using Builtwith or EasyLeadz.
Once you have that list you can find the right decision makers either over Linkedin or use a free email finder tool like EasyEmail finder.
After you have the list then you can start reaching out to these prospects over email and follow up if they don’t reply you back. This too can be automated using several tools like Replyup or Mailshake or EasyLeadz.
Builtwith Intercom
Builtwith is a great tool which can be used for your initial research.
The only challenge will be to automate this process because once you have the list of companies after that you will have to apply several other factors like location, job roles, company size, industry, company type in order to narrow down your company targeting.
The other option is to use EasyLeadz sales intelligence tool to automate this process of finding companies using Intercom and reach out to the decision makers over email.
Companies using Intercom
EasyLeadz will keep tracking such companies and reach out to the right decision makers all by itself thus saving you tons of manual research.
Target companies by their business model
Depending on what type of companies are your existing users you can narrow down your search criterion by targeting companies based on their business model and reach out to right prospects.
If your chat support tool is used by B2C companies like ecommerce companies then you can track ecommerce companies and reach out to them.
If your chat support tool is used by mostly technology companies like SAAS companies then you can just focus on SAAS companies in order to generate more effective leads.
This can be further narrowed down by the industry of the company like if your chat support tool is more relevant to fashion based ecommerce companies then you can do that.
In order to target ecommerce companies or find list of SAAS companies you can use EasyLeadz sales intelligence tool.
Ecommerce companies in USA
EasyLeadz sales automation bot – EasyBot – will automatically find more ecommerce companies and start reaching out to them over email and follow up with consistently to generate more leads on its own thus saving you manual hours you may otherwise spend on researching companies.
SAAS companies in USA
Thus, the need to do manual research can be eliminated by using sales automation tools or you can still do the same thing manually by using free information providers like Google and generate more quality leads for your chat support tool.
When you do outbound sales then even before writing your first cold email template you need to identify who are the most prominent buyers of your product or services.
Ideal customer means that you have a clear understanding of your buyers profile that is where do they live, which industry they fall into, how many employees they have in their organisation, how much revenue they have.
Once you have defined a ideal customer profile then next step is to figure out where to get the information of your prospects i.e their company and decision makers information.
Once your targeting list is ready then before sending out emails you should verify the email list.
If you send emails that get bounced back then your domain authority goes down which means your future emails will either go in SPAM or in promotion box.
Its always better to have a clean email list which has 100 prospects instead of 1000 prospects whose emails will go bounce.
If you use EasyLeadz then you don’t have to verify emails as all emails are pre verified with 10 step AI based SMTP verification process.
If you use other tools to prepare your emails then you may have to verify your emails.
There are two great tools that you may use to verify your emails in bulk:
You can simply upload your bulk list in excel and download the list back with information of whether emails are verified, not verified or catch all emails.
Always prefer to send emails to only verified emails.
A well defined Ideal Customer Profile can make or break your business. Businesses take months if not years to create an Ideal Customer Profile.
But what is Ideal Customer profile anyway?
Ideal customer profile defines the kind of customers who are most fruitful revenue generating buyers for your product or services.
They are the ones because of whom your business is in good shape. They are the ones who give you the most referrals. They are the ones who give you good word of mouth.
They are the ones for whom you would like to build a new feature in your product. They are the ones for whom you would like to run a new sales or marketing campaign and like to get them to buy your product or service.
There is no universal defining of an Ideal Customer Profile but you may think of these customers as your dream customers.
How to create an Ideal customer profile?
Its a long and iterative process and involves experimentation.
Its always good to choose your customers. If you are lucky enough to choose your customers then you are in a good shape of your business.
A good customer can bring more customers but a bad customer can kill your brand, waste your resources and make you lose your focus and energy on unnecessary things that will hurt your business in the long run.
When UBER started their business in San Francisco their ideal customers were the wall street people who can afford to pay for a luxury sedan.
UBER started out their marketing by putting up kiosks in places where people like these gathered a lot and had money to pay for a luxury sedan.
UBER did not offered any lost cost rides at the beginning because they wanted these rich folks to tell other rich folks about UBER Services.
These folks can afford easily and would not bother to try UBER service. If they liked it would be a big hit. Which happened in UBER case eventually.
There are three methods to create an ideal customer profile:
Market based approach
Account based approach
Lookalike based approach
Market based approach for Ideal Customer Profile
In the market based approach you define your Ideal customer based on their firmographic and demographic attributes.
This approach is used when you want to reach out to customers based on their industry, location, size or other firmographic factors OR you don’t have specific companies in mind that you want to reach out OR your market is broad in size.
Lets say you are a customer support solution provider. Your ideal buyers are the ones who will need customer support tools to assist their own customers.
While making this ideal customer profile you will have to understand what kind of customers are more likely to buy a customer support tool.
In case of a customer support tool the companies who are in B2C space and have a more web traffic will be a good fit for this customer support tool.
So instead of randomly targeting companies who start with companies who are in B2C space and have a decent web traffic.
Based on your initial testing of doing outbound outreach aka cold emails to these prospects you understand what is the response rate and closure rates.
After that you can improvise your Ideal customer profile based on who all shows more interest to your customer support tool.
Firmographic attributes in Ideal Customer Profile
Industry like Real Estate, Internet, Consumer Goods etc.
Size of the company – Startups, SME, Mid sized, Enterprise customers
Location of your Ideal customers – City, State or Country
Company type – Ecommerce, SAAS, Product or service based company
Estimated Revenue
Business model i.e B2B or B2C
Monthly web traffic
Their recent activities like funding, hiring, product launches, top level changes
Other company attribute
Demographic attributes of Ideal Customer Profile
Title of the buyers or influencers
Department of the buyers
Authority of the buyers or level of the buyers in the organisation
The more precise your Ideal customer profile is the better your outreach will be and eventually your response rate.
If you are reaching out to ecommerce companies then your approach to these companies will be having a different cold email subject line or cold email copy which will give you better results.
Personalisation can be done based on ideal customer profile. The higher the personalisation the better is your response rate.
One most important profile attribute is the title of the prospects based on the size of the company. Cold emails generally do not work on CEO’s of large size companies.
If you are reaching out to founder of a 500+ employee size company for a chat bot solution then do you think s(he) will care to reply you back? Most likely s(he) wont.
So you will have to define your targeting based on the size of the company and the title at-least if not something else.
Account based approach for Ideal Customer Profile
Account based marketing approach works when you have specific company names that you want to target. This approach is defined based on a limited market.
If you are selling to only Fortune 100 companies. So your target market and approach for selling and reach out to these prospects will be more relationship driven than outbound approach.
Cold email generally do not work on account based marketing approach.
Account based marketing or ABM is used when you have a high ticket product or service and you want to focus on certain companies that you believe are more suited as a buyer.
EasyLeadz offers a free email finder tool using which you can find contacts in specific companies.
EasyLeadz email finder tool
Lookalike based approach for Ideal Customer Profile
Lookalike based marketing approach in B2B sales is used when you already have certain companies using your products or services.
You can define your ideal customer profile based on the attributes of your existing customers.
Example: If all of your existing companies are ecommerce companies and they are based out of United States and they have an employee size of 50 then you can use these attributes to create an ideal customer profile.
The more attributes you can pick up from your existing customers the better your targeting becomes for your B2B sales campaign.
Furthermore you can also check who all your existing users and their titles. If founders are using your product then you should reach out to more and more founders.
As said the better your Ideal customer profile is defined the better your outreach is and the higher your response rates will be for your outbound campaigns.
How To Get Quality Clients For an E-Learning Business
Getting quality leads and clients for any business is a process in itself. E-learning business can also create a quality and consistent lead generation channel for getting quality clients for their business.
We are going to focus on outbound sales for this post and how outbound sales can improve lead generation for your e-learning business.
When you are in E-learning business you may want to reach out to following personas:
Corporates for placement opportunities or staffing opportunities.
Schools or Universities.
Academy or professional training organisations.
I will explain how you can reach out to all three personas and create a consistent quality lead generation channel.
Persona One: Corporates
While reaching out to corporates define your Ideal Customer Profile as in what kind of corporates will be more likely to work with you or buy your product or services.
Example : If you are into student placements and these students are specially trained in digital marketing courses then you need to optimise your outbound sales and targeting to companies who are more likely to hire for digital marketing roles.
Targeting segment A : Recently funded companies
Recently funded companies will be in active hiring mode as they have to expand their business and grow fast with the money they have received in funding.
Thus, any company that is into staffing or student placements should reach out to recently funded startups.
EasyLeadz sales intelligence platform can automatically track recently funded startups and find out the right decision maker in these companies and reach out to them.
Recently funded startups
While reaching out to these companies you will have to optimise your content including a good email subject line and keep your content short.
People generally don’t like lengthy emails as no one has time to read. If you write a short email that addresses their problems and how your can solve their problem they may be interested to talk to you further.
Writing a good B2B cold email and have a sales follow up strategy will improve your response rates.
Targeting segment B : Actively hiring companies
Companies that are actively hiring are anyways on hiring spree. It means you must track and reach out to them as the timing is perfect for them to understand more about your staffing services.
If you want to reach out to actively hiring companies then you can either use Google job search or track job portals or use an automated sales automation tool like EasyLeadz.
Actively hiring companies
Targeting segment C : Market wide targeting by company attributes
The other targeting method is based on industry and market.
You can target companies by their industry and other attributes like if they an Ecommerce company, SAAS company or if they are a BPO or call centre.
Depending upon the courses your E-learning business provides you can always optimise your targeting by specific industry.
If you provide BPO related courses then reaching out to all BPO’s with a certain size of the company is an ideal option.
The other outreach is when you want to tie up with Schools or Universities for your online certifications.
This could be a bulk deal as these schools may divert students to your portal in bulk. One deal with a school can cover up your 80% of the revenues if you are focussing on individual students for now.
The decision makers in schools are generally the owners and not professors or teachers.
Principals may be the influencers but the decision is mostly taken up by the owner of the school.
Using EasyLeadz you can create a targeting criterion of reaching out to all schools or universities in a specific area and EasyLeadz can automatically start finding and reaching out to the Directors of these schools or universities.
Persona Three: Academy or professional training organisations
The last targeting option is to tie up with other Academy or professional training organisations for cross sales opportunities.
Finding and reaching out to these companies is a big task in itself. You can google search these companies and can find 100+ companies but you will have to spend man power in order to create a good quality prospect list.
The other option is to use the advanced machine learning based company research tool which can instantly find academy or coaching institutes as per your targeting criterion.
List of Academy in India
The academy targeting can also work as a bulk cross promotional deal for your E-learning business.
At the end its all about optimising your targeting and qualifying companies the right way. Spend less time on manual prospecting and scale your sales prospecting with the right tools.
You can also invest this saved time on more important tasks like customers calls.
The key to good outbound sales is understand when your buyer has a need and who has a need and when you can reach out to them.
There are over 100,000+ staffing companies in India. Getting quality clients for a staffing business is hard.
I am going to share few tips on how you can generate quality leads for your staffing business. The tips are focussed on outbound sales. You can also generate leads via content marketing or inbound marketing.
Lets focus on outbound sales for now and see how you can improve your B2B lead generation for your staffing agency.
Target recently funded companies
In order to generate quality leads for any business the first step is to understand your Ideal customer profile or to say which kind of companies will be more likely to do business with you.
Startups who have recently raised funding will be the one who have just got money in their bank. The next thing these startups do is expand their business into multiple geographies or operational expansion.
Thus, these companies will have immediate need for hiring more staffing both technical and non-technical.
EasyBot can automatically send personalised emails to these companies and if your prospects do not reply back then EasyBot can automatically follow up with these prospects so as to improve your response rates.
List of recently funded startups capture by EasyBot
While reaching out to these companies make sure your email is personalised and have a good email follow up strategy.
Always prefer to write short subject lines and include a call to action in your B2B cold email.
You can refer to cold email templates that we have written for our community based on experience of sending 100,000+ emails.
Track companies that are actively hiring
The companies that are actively hiring are already telling you that they have a hiring need. Now only difference is to figure out which companies are keen to outsource their hiring needs and which want to do it in-house.
You can always optimise your targeting to these companies by using industry and location as qualification criterion.
On top of it you can only reach out to companies that are hiring for roles that your staffing company has expertise to fill in.
Some staffing companies are expert in IT roles and some are in manufacturing roles. So depending on your business expertise you can narrow down your Ideal customer profile and target the right companies for your business.
EasyBot can also track companies hiring for specific roles and you can reach out to those companies by activating EasyBot and putting it on auto pilot mode.
Once it is on auto pilot mode you can relax as EasyBot captures companies daily, find the decision maker and reach out to those companies all by itself.
Track actively hiring companies
Track by company attributes
Your staffing company may have a specific niche that you have expertise in.
Most of the sales people spend hours in manual research and thats why they don’t do it. They simply use industry, location and few other parameters as qualifying criterion and do their outreach to these companies.
This may result in very broad targeting and your outreach may not give you the desired results.
3 strong signs that your cold email is marked as SPAM
When you send cold emails for your outbound sales many a times your email goes to SPAM. This happens for reasons which are sometimes in control and sometimes beyond our control.
Let’s just focus on things that we can monitor and control and avoid our cold emails lending up in SPAM box.
You get very less open rates
If you send 100 emails and only 10 out of them are getting opened it means either you are not targeting the right companies for your sales campaign or most of your emails are going in SPAM.
If you send a random email to someone who is least likely to buy your product then your emails will not get enough open rates and a lot of these prospects will mark your email as SPAM.
This can also mean that your email subject line is not good enough for your prospect to open your emails. Having some good cold email subject lines can help you improve your open rates.
You get very less reply rates
Once you passed the open rate test next step is to monitor your response rates. Some one has opened your email but they cant find your email cop y to be interesting enough to reply you.
You may not be addressing their problems and only focussing on selling your product which can be one of the reasons for not getting enough reply rates on your b2b campaigns.
If you are getting poor response rates then chance are that most of them are also marking your email as SPAM because they are not finding your emails relevant.
Enter your email domain as shown in picture below and it will show results on if you are being included in any of the blacklists or not and what steps your can take to remove yourself from the blacklist.
What is cold email & how to write effective cold emails
What is cold email?
A cold emailis a method of sending someone an email without any interactions with that person beforehand. Its a technique adopted by businesses or to say sales professionals globally to reach out to other businesses in order to generate leads for their products or services.
A cold email is often referred to as outbound sales. Where “out” means when you reach out to someone from your side before even they show interest to buy your product or service.
Once you send someone a cold email they may or may not open your email and thats referred to “open rates“
If they reply you back then its referred to as reply rate and is calculated in terms of percentage.
If someone sends cold emails to 100 people and get 10 reply from those emails then the reply rate will be 10%.
How to write effective cold emails
Sending cold email is an art. If you can learn how to master this art then this can become a defensive and low cost lead generation technique for your business.
In order to do it right take care of following key cold email points:
All these key cold email points are explained below.
Create an ideal customer profile
First of all you will have to understand why do you want to send someone a cold email and whom you want to send cold emails to.
You will have to work on your Ideal Customer Profiles before you decide on sending cold emails and make cold emails an effective sales lead generation strategy for your business.
If you send cold emails to random businesses before understanding their needs and whether they will have requirement of your product or service then you are basically spamming and spamming is not good for your business.
That’s why always have an understand of what kind of businesses will be more likely to buy your product or service and only then reach out to them via cold emails.
Find the right contacts and their emails
After understand the type of businesses who will need your product or service, next step is to find the right decision maker and get their emails and create a B2B targeting list for your cold email campaign.
There are many tools which you can use for free for creating your B2B targeting list.
You will have to make sure you personalise all your emails while writing the templates.
Use a good subject line
If you get an email from some stranger and the subject line is boring and not relevant to your business would you care to open that email and read whats it all about?
I would say I will not open that random email.
But if someone have my name in that subject and the subject line is super short and may include some context to my business goals or problems then I am more likely to open that email and read further.
And if the body of email is more relevant to my problems or challenges and there is solution to that problem in that email then I will be more interested to reply further.
We get so many emails and most of them either land up in our promotional box or spam directly and thus we only reply to most relevant emails we get in a day.
Monitor and improve your sales targeting
Start slow and keep progressing with your cold email goals. Start by sending 10 or 20 emails in a day and warm up your email deliverability and monitor how much open rates and response rates your are getting on your emails.
If the open rate is at least 25-30% and you have a response rate of 5-7% then you are in good shape.
Monitor and improve your B2B targeting and see if you can improve your open rates and response rates further by changing the Ideal customer profile, subject lines or email copy.
Respect laws
If you are sending cold emails to citizens in the European region then there are laws like GDPR which prevents you from sending emails to strangers without their consent and irrelevant emails.
You can send email to businesses on their email addresses that are available on public domain i.e their website and if you want to send someone an email then that should be super relevant and not sent like a spam.
There are laws in other countries like USA which is CAN SPAM ACT law and most of the countries have email sending laws that you must adhere to while sending cold emails to anyone.
